1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to methods of incorporating ingredients comprised of fine particles that are otherwise difficult to work with into a variety of snack food products. In particular, the present invention relates to micropellets comprising nutritious powder components and the snack food products made therewith.
2. Description of Related Art
Grains such as corn are highly useful ingredients for the preparation of ready-to-eat snack food products. While these grains contain valuable nutrients, the incorporation of nutritionally advantageous material and/or functional ingredients from other sources remains a topic of high interest in the food industry. However, such inclusion is rarely an easy task. The problems that most food processing platforms experience lie, to some extent, with the high temperatures and/or high pressures used in the production and processing of ready-to-eat snack food products. Such conditions tend to substantially degrade any heat-labile ingredients to the point of significant or complete loss of functionality. Cooking processes tend to change minerals, amino acids and vitamins into unusable forms, destroying and heat denaturing desirable nutrients of many heat-labile components. Thus, inclusion of amino acids, proteins, flavors, spices, vitamins, minerals and other heat-labile ingredients in general tends to be problematic due to the loss of their structure with a correlating undesired loss of nutritional properties of these ingredients when subjected to high temperatures or pressures for cooking Exacerbating the problem is the small granular or powder-like forms in which many of these ingredients are typically available. These forms often prove difficult and, in some cases, even impossible to incorporate into certain production lines.
Corn collets, for example, are popular consumer items produced and marketed under the Cheetos® brand label, for which there exists a great demand. These products are generally made by extruding moistened corn meal through an extruder, followed by a drying step such as baking or frying to remove additional moisture after extrusion to produce shelf-stable, ready-to-eat snack products. Since the introduction of extruders in the industry, many different varieties of these cornmeal snacks have been introduced. However, corn, or cornmeal, remains by far the most common ingredient used for these direct-expanded snack food products; not only due to the desirable expansion properties of corn, but also due to the equipment (or extruder) that dictates and often limits the range of usable raw materials.
FIG. 1 depicts one well-liked variety of corn collets, known as random corn collets 2, having unique, twisted (“random”) shapes and protrusions. These dense random corn collets 2 comprise a unique and highly desirable crunchy texture that can only be produced via specialized extrusion processes, utilizing a rotating disk die extruder. It is a widely known and generally accepted fact in the industry that rotating disk die extruders (also known as random extruders) cannot handle flour-like granular materials. Instead, random extruder formulations typically comprise only corn grits or corn meal to create the collets 2 of FIG. 1. By way of example, Tables 1 and 2 provide, respectively, a typical corn meal particle size distribution for use with a random extruder and a typical formula as introduced into a random extruder.
TABLE 1Corn meal SpecificationsUS sieve sizeTypical analysis (%)on 160on 20<1on 259on 3043on 4045on 502through 50<1
TABLE 2Fried corn collet formulaIngredientInto Extruder (%)Corn meal96Water4
Introduction of anything other than refined farinaceous materials such as corn meal (having bran and germ removed) into the random extruder has proved extremely difficult. In particular, granular materials such as flour or powder typically cause blockage and halt production in random extrusion lines. Very little, if anything, has been done in the industry to address the problems presented by the random extruder since its introduction in the 1940s. While it may be possible to incorporate some amounts of other ingredients to slightly modify the direct expanded products, to date, these amounts are not large enough to significantly vary the nutritional properties of the random collet. Indeed, it seems simply accepted that the random extruder has very narrow capabilities in terms of formula or ingredient variations.
Consequently, it remains desirable to have a method for incorporating flour-like ingredients in the random extruder. In particular, the introduction of these ingredients into a random extruder while mimicking the appealing characteristics of the crunchy corn collet 2 is highly desirable; namely, taste, appearance and mouthfeel (or texture). There is further a need for methods of eliminating and overcoming the problems caused by the narrow capabilities of the random extruder as well as high temperature processes that degrade heat sensitive nutrients. In addition, it is desirable to have methods that allow for taking advantage of the nutritional aspects of ingredients that may be comprised of fine or flour-like particles. Such methods should allow for the inclusion of high amounts of these nutritional components other than grains into snack foods, including, for instance, the highly sought-after, dense and crunchy random corn collets 2. It is also desired that the introduction of ingredients other than corn not interfere with commercial production throughput levels, while advantageously affecting the nutritional aspects of the final snack food product. Such snack food products should emulate the organoleptic properties, including taste and texture, of a conventionally produced shelf stable and ready to eat snack food product made of grains such as corn.